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ACMI snares Tim Burton show for Winter Masterpieces

THE macabre, twisted, and darkly humorous work of Hollywood film
director Tim Burton will be the focus of next year's Melbourne
Winter Masterpieces series at the Australian Centre for the Moving
Image.

In an impressive coup for ACMI, the Burton exhibition, featuring
more than 700 drawings, paintings, puppets, costumes, storyboards
and other artefacts from his film career, will head to Melbourne
straight from New York's Museum of Modern Art.

''In essence, MoMA does not tour shows like this … so it
was a process of wooing,'' said ACMI director Tony Sweeney
yesterday.

Also on display will be Burton's student films and amateur short
films made during his youth in Burbank, California, such as the
wacky Doctor of Doom, in which he stars and in which his mad
genius is already apparent.

He will come to Melbourne for the launch of the show next June,
and ACMI hopes that his partner and regular star of his films,
Helena Bonham Carter, and his long-time muse Johnny Depp, will also
fly in for the opening.

Screening concurrently with the ACMI exhibition will be a
program of Burton's feature films and the films that inspired his
career (at the Museum of Modern Art, influential films such as
Frankenstein, Nosferatu and Earthquake were
shown).

While millions of people around the globe are familiar with
Burton's cinematic work, few have had the opportunity to see the
conceptual artwork for his films, or to appreciate the vast range
of his creativity, which stretches back to his childhood as a loner
constantly roaming with his sketchbook and pencils - a practice he
continues to this day.

''Everybody draws … I just never stopped when the teachers
told me to,'' he was recently quoted as saying in online
entertainment magazine Variety.

Yet, when Museum of Modern Art representatives first contacted
Burton and told him about their plans for a retrospective on his
career, he thought it was an ''elaborate joke of some sort''.

''I didn't grow up in a museum culture,'' he said at the
announcement of the New York show in June. ''The Hollywood Wax
Museum was my first exposure to a museum.''

But it was no joke, and museum director Glenn D. Lowry and
curator Ron Magliozzi have gone as far as describing Burton as a
''modern Andy Warhol''.

The timing of the Burton show's arrival in Melbourne is
auspicious, coming soon after the March release of his latest film,
Alice in Wonderland, based on the psychedelic children's
book by Lewis Carroll.

Now in post-production, the film stars Depp as the Mad Hatter,
Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat,
and Australian actress Mia Wasikowska as Alice.

Melbourne audiences will have the bonus of seeing extra material
from Alice in Wonderland - ACMI curators are flying to the
Disney studios in Los Angeles next month to choose artefacts from
that production to show here next year.

The success of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series, which
included the recent blockbuster Dali exhibition at the National
Gallery of Victoria, was crucial in helping to persuade the museum
to send its show here.